Lady Anne's Deception (14 page)

All of Annie’s newfound esteem crumbled away. She did not care who was waiting for her in the study.

All she cared about was that he had not kissed her. He did not care for her. Last night meant nothing to him. It did not dawn on her for a moment that her husband was very worried about something and had not even noticed her offered kiss.

“Well, if they’ve come to see me, I suppose I’d better see them,” she said in a brittle voice, sweeping in front of him toward the study.

Two middle-aged men rose at her entrance. Her husband followed her in and closed the door. “May I present Detective Inspectors Carton and Johns of the Yard. Mr. Carton, Mr. Johns, my wife.”

Annie gave them a chilly nod and took a seat facing them. The marquess stood behind her chair.

Mr. Carton was the spokesman. He was not like Annie’s idea of a policeman at all. He was very tall and distinguished-looking with a thin, intelligent face.

“We wish to ask you a few questions, my lady,” he began. “It concerns the death of Miss Hammond.”

Annie flushed guiltily. Suddenly it seemed terrible that she had not given one thought since last night to that poor woman’s death.

“I found Miss Hammond a trifle eccentric,” she said hesitantly. “But I would not have said she was the sort of lady to take her own life.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Carton, in a level voice.

“But she seemed very worried . . . almost frightened . . . when I last saw her. Oh, dear!” Annie blushed miserably again. She remembered the look on Mary Hammond’s white face and how she had turned even whiter at the sound of a step on the landing above.

“You have remembered something,” prompted Mr. Carton gently.

“Yes, I . . .” Annie twisted her head and looked up anxiously at her husband.

His face wore a closed, shuttered look as he stared straight in front of him.

“Yes?” Mr. Carton prompted again.

“Well, it was at the ball. She said she wanted to speak to me about something.”

“And did she?”

“Well, no. You see, I was talking to my future brother-in-law, Mr. Harry Bellamy, so I said I’d see her later. Oh, she asked me if I had seen Mr. Shaw-Bufford.”

“I gather Mr. Shaw-Bufford arrived after the body of Miss Hammond had been found.”

“Perhaps,” said Annie miserably, “if I had given her the time, if only I had spoken to her, she would not have done this terrible thing.”

“You are under the impression that Miss Hammond committed suicide?”

Annie stared at the inspector, wide-eyed. “But of course she did. You can’t mean . . . ?”

“It was made to look like suicide, yes, but in fact Miss Hammond was murdered. The autopsy was performed this morning and it revealed that Miss Hammond had been strangled by someone
before
the rope was put around her neck.”

“Oh,” said Annie weakly. Everything suddenly seemed unreal: the two detectives sitting so solemnly across from her, her husband standing rigidly behind her, the ticking of the black marble clock above the fireplace.

“We also found evidence in Miss Hammond’s lodgings that points to the fact that she may well have been the lady who tried to kill the prime minister yesterday. She bungled the job, so someone killed her.

A powerful woman could do the job.”

Annie began to feel sick.

“So,” pursued Mr. Carton, “we want you to tell us about this society. Miss Hammond gave lectures, that we know. But she has no record of having undertaken any militant action before. We would have said she simply enjoyed public speaking. Can you think of any members of her society who might have killed her?”

Annie shook her head. “It’s silly, but I never really got to know any of them. She was a sort of one-woman organization when I first met her at Britlingsea. Then she called and asked if she could use this house for a committee meeting. I agreed. I knew some of the women who came, certainly Mrs.

Tommy Winton, who gave the ball, and some of the other society ladies. But the ones I knew, well, I think they were simply using the whole thing as an excuse to have a sort of charity ball.

“The other women—there were about three—who seemed to belong to Miss Hammond’s new movement, I hadn’t seen them before, and I doubt if I would recognize any of them again.”

“Were the speeches—I assume there were speeches—particularly militant? Was there any mention of Mr. Macleod’s name?”

Annie passed a hand over her brow. “I can’t remember. I was coming down with influenza and I was already running a fever, you see, and I was out of the room most of the time Miss Hammond was talking.”

“Where did you go? To lie down?”

“N-no. Mr. Shaw-Bufford wanted to talk to me—in the study.”

Mr. Carton leaned forward. “What did he want to see you about, my lady?”

Annie stared at the floor.

“My lady,” said Mr. Carton, “this is a murder investigation. You must tell me why the chancellor wished to talk to you in private.”

“He wanted to ask me for money,” mumbled Annie.

She could almost feel her husband’s hands tightening on the back of the chair. She had lied to him. She had told him that Mr. Shaw-Bufford had not asked her for money.

“For himself?”

“No. For Miss Hammond’s society.”

“How much, my lady?”

“T-ten thousand pounds.”

“Ten
thousand
pounds! That’s a great deal of money. A fortune!”

“I didn’t give it to him,” said Annie quickly.

“And that was the end of the matter?”

There was a long silence. The fog had cleared, but a dismal, gusty, blustery wind was howling through the streets of London. A torn newspaper danced an erratic ballet in front of the window. The window frame rattled. The fire crackled and the clock ticked.

“My lady,” said Mr. Carton, “the only way we are going to solve this business is by demanding complete honesty from all the people we have to interview. Now, I will repeat my question. Did the chancellor just let the matter drop?”

Oh, thought Annie, miserably, Jasper is going to find out how I have lied and lied again.

“I felt ill. I needed time,” she said wearily. “I told him to come back on Wednesday. He did. But I was too ill to see him. When I finally did see him, I said I would make out the check to the society. My husband had told me to do that. He said I was never to make a check out to an individual. Mr.

Shaw-Bufford was . . . well, rather insistent. So I told him I had no money of my own. I lied. I said that he should ask my husband. And he left. He—he was angry.”

“Well, then, my lady,” said Mr. Carton. “Don’t distress yourself. We shall probably find that Mr.

Shaw-Bufford wanted the money for the society and for no other reason. Now, is there anything else you can think of that might help us?”

There was. Annie was sure there was something there at the back of her mind, but, for the life of her, she couldn’t think of what it was.

She shook her head dumbly.

“I may as well tell you, my lady, that I spoke to Mr. Harry Bellamy this morning. He said that you were worried about the ball being a sham. That it was not really for something vague like Women of the World, but for a feminist society run by Miss Hammond. In fact, he called in person at the Yard to tell us.

Were you, in fact, very upset by this deception?”

Poor Annie felt that she had told enough truth for one morning.

“Yes,” she said.

“I am afraid that was not the case,” came the voice of her husband from behind her. “My wife pretended to sprain her ankle so as to manufacture an opportunity of being alone with Mr. Bellamy. I think you will find that my wife doesn’t care two pins whether women get the vote or not. She merely wanted to make her sister jealous. Lady Marigold Sinclair is affianced to Mr. Bellamy.”

“Is this true, my lady?” asked Mr. Carton.

“Yes,” said Annie, in a stifled voice. In that moment she could have killed her husband. How
dare
he hold her actions up to ridicule?

“Then I think that will be all for the moment,” said the inspector, signaling to his colleague. “I hope I do not have to trouble you again. My lord, my lady, good day to you.”

After the policemen had left, Annie walked to the window and stared out at the dismal day.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” she said in a low voice.

“Yes,” came her husband’s infuriatingly bland voice. “It was necessary to tell the police the truth. That way you cannot be suspected of murder.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Annie, whirling around to face him.

“It also cleared the air. There has been too much misunderstanding between us. I ask you not to lie to me again, Annie.”

“You pompous ass,” howled Annie. “How dare you stand there and pontificate? How dare you tell those coppers that I have no interest in women getting the vote? I care very much. I think women have a damn hard time time of it. I think
I
have a hard time of it being married to you.”

“On the contrary, you have a very easy time. You are very much your own mistress. You came to me willingly last night, or do I have to remind you of that?”

“That was because I was afraid,” Annie flashed back. “I had just seen a dead body for the first time in my life, and a pretty awful one at that!”

“And what went on between us last night? How do you interpret that, my fair lady?”

“Lust!”

Although he did not move an inch, it was as if he were retreating from her, step by step, moving away, moving far away to the other side of a great, black gulf of resentment and hurt and misunderstanding.

The silence seemed to go on forever.

Then he gave a little shrug. “I have business to attend to,” said the Marquess of Torrance.

And so he left.

Annie had never felt more alone in her life.

Annie sat in front of the Houses of Parliament, surrounded by ranks of silent women, all demanding the vote with their long vigil.

The only comfort she had was the realization that she was doing it because she really thought women should get the vote and not to revenge herself on her husband.

During the past few weeks, she had hardly seen him at all, and when she had he had been polite and punctilious. At that moment, he was in the House of Lords. He had been up most of the night before preparing his speech. That much Annie had gleaned from the servants, who were most impressed that his lordship wrote his own speeches and did not employ the services of a secretary.

Annie had, however, seen quite a deal of Detective-Inspector Carton. He had returned on one occasion, bringing with him Chief Superintendent Delaney who, he said, was in charge of the case.

The chief superintendent was a large, fatherly man who quickly put Annie at her ease. He took her over the whole business again, starting with her first meeting with Miss Hammond.

Mr. Shaw-Bufford had appeared as a genuine champion of women’s rights, Mr. Delaney had said.

Annie wondered whether to pass on her husband’s cynical opinion that the chancellor wanted to buy a peerage but decided against it.

Miss Hammond, it transpired, had been a country solicitor’s daughter, living on a small annuity left her in her parents’ will. Her lodgings in Bayswater had been depressingly shabby, Mr. Delaney had said. A rifle, recently fired, had been found hidden under the mattress, together with a diary that left very little doubt in the minds of the police that Miss Hammond had been guilty of the attempt on the life of the prime minister.

“He tells me it is the only way,” Miss Hammond had written after describing how she meant to go about shooting Mr. Macleod outside the House of Commons. “I trust him because he is wise, although some call him Evil.”

Annie shivered and pulled her cloak more tightly about her shoulders. The “he” of the diary, Mr.

Delaney had decided, was probably the devil. He had asked if Miss Hammond had shown any signs of being a religious fanatic, but Annie had said that Miss Hammond only appeared fanatical on the subject of men.

The women who surrounded Annie during the vigil were mostly well-to-do, middle-class women. Annie had been sitting there for seven hours and she was feeling chilled to the bone. But if they could do it, she could, she told herself sternly. She had decided to wait until the House rose in three hours’ time, then go home and have a hot bath.

Several times she had thought of going to her husband and explaining what had driven her to say those things. That it was not just because he had made her feel like a fool in front of the police; it was because he seemed to have joined the serried ranks of authority figures who always made her feel like a fool.

Her mother and father were in London to begin the preparations for Marigold’s wedding. The countess had called on Annie to exclaim with horror over the fact that her younger daughter had got her name involved in a murder scandal. How Annie had longed to unburden herself. To cry for advice! But her mother had seemed as chilly and aloof as ever and was completely taken up with relishing the idea of what a beautiful bride Marigold would make.

Annie had then called on Mrs. Tommy Winton, hoping that that lady might have some advice on the difficulties of marriage.

But it seemed that Mrs. Winton and her society friends in some way blamed Annie for the ruin of their ball. Annie should have known, Mrs. Winton had said, rattling the teacups, that Mary Hammond was the sort of woman to do a terribly embarrassing thing like hanging herself in the most public manner possible.

Annie had tried to point out that it was a case of murder, not suicide, to which Mrs. Winton had replied with a superior smile that it was just like Annie to side with the police. She had added insult to injury by saying that she had decided that the whole idea of the vote for women was quite ridiculous and rather distasteful. Much better to leave the running of the country to the men. Equality was ridiculous. Had women had to fight the Boers? No, of course not. Well, if Annie and her ilk pursued their mad course, they would end up on the battlefield, fighting alongside the men and absolutely ruining their complexions.

Although mud
was
said to be beneficial. Had Annie heard of the latest treatment at Solange? It was at this point that Annie had left.